Cheating Justice (4 page)

Their commentary was spiked by falsified references to weapons of mass destruction, nuclear materials procurement, alliances between the al Qaeda perpetrators of 9/11 and Saddam Hussein, manipulated intelligence, statements from unverified “informers,” misrepresentations about the findings of UN weapons inspectors, and more. The Bush team declared that Iraq presented an advancing and immediate threat to the United States on a weekly, and sometimes daily, basis. A vast number of these claims were untrue. The White House “decided to pursue a political propaganda campaign to sell the war to the American people,” former Bush press secretary Scott McClellan explained in his 2008 book,
What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception.
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A large number of false statements—scores of them—were made personally by President Bush, and evidence has debunked them. In speech after speech, statement after statement, the president spun falsehoods, as a selection of his comments shows. For example, on September 12, 2002,
the day after the 9/11 anniversary, the president told the United Nations General Assembly: “Iraq has made several attempts to buy high-strength aluminum tubes used to enrich uranium for a nuclear weapon.”
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This was untrue. In a radio address on September 14, 2002, President Bush said, “By supporting terrorist groups, repressing his own people and pursuing weapons of mass destruction in defiance of a decade of U.N. resolutions, Saddam Hussein's regime has proven itself a grave and gathering danger.”
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This was untrue. In a photo op in Washington, D.C., with Colombian president Álvaro Uribe on September 25, 2002, President Bush said, “You can't distinguish between al Qaeda and Saddam.”
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This was untrue.

In a major address on October 7, 2002, at the Cincinnati Museum Center, the president invoked the 9/11 attacks five times, saying that failure to act against Iraq would “allow terrorists access to new weapons and new resources.” At the time, pressure was mounting for Congress to vote immediately on a joint resolution that would give the go-ahead for a war in Iraq. The president told his Cincinnati audience, “Evidence indicates that Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program.” He said, “America must not ignore the threat gathering against us. Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof—the smoking gun—that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.”
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These statements were also untrue.

On February 8, 2003, in a radio address, President Bush said that Iraq has “provided Al Qaeda with chemical and biological weapons training.”
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On March 17, 2003, on the eve of war, President Bush said in a statement addressed to the nation that terrorists could obtain nuclear weapons from Iraq and “kill thousands or hundreds of thousands of innocent people in our country.”
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President Bush was joined in this frenzy of deceptive commentary by a cohort of other administration officials, speeding from forum to forum. For example, Vice President Cheney said on August 26, 2002, in a speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars that Iraq was “as grave a threat as can be imagined” and “a mortal threat.” The vice president added, “Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us.”
44
On
Meet the Press
on September 8, 2002, Vice President Cheney said, “We know with absolute certainty that he [Saddam] is using his procurement system to acquire the equipment he needs to enrich uranium to build a nuclear weapon.”
45

National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice insisted on
PBS News Hour
on September 25, 2002, that there was a “relationship” between al Qaeda and Iraq,
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and on September 27, Secretary Rumsfeld told the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce that he had “bulletproof” evidence of Saddam–al Qaeda links.
47
Secretary of State Colin Powell told the UN Security Council on February 5, 2003, that a “sinister nexus” existed between Saddam and “the al Qaeda terrorist network.”
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All of these statements were untrue.

In fact, the all-important October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), an authoritative document consolidating the opinions of all the intelligence agencies, gave the rating of “low confidence” to the possibility that Saddam would share weapons with al Qaeda, according to the authors of “WMD in Iraq,” published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
49

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) released a report in January 2003 stating that there was no evidence of a nuclear threat. UN inspectors had entered Iraq on November 27, 2002, conducted more than six hundred inspections in the four months leading up to the war's inception,
50
and found no evidence of weapons of mass destruction of any sort.
51

On January 29, 2003, just six weeks before the launch of the war, the CIA found an absence of evidence that Iraq had provided training to al Qaeda, according to declassified documents released by Senator Carl Levin on April 15, 2005.
52

On January 31, 2003, President Bush as much as acknowledged to British prime minister Tony Blair that no weapons of mass destruction were in Iraq, reported a memo later leaked to international lawyer Philippe Sands, author of the book,
Lawless World.
The president suggested other ideas to Blair for inciting war, such as painting planes to look like UN aircraft in hopes that Iraq would shoot them down and create a pretext for war.
53

On March 7, 2003—less than two weeks before the U.S. military marched into Iraq—Director-General Mohamed ElBaradei of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) repeated the assessment that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
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Responding, Vice President Cheney belittled the UN inspectors on NBC's
Meet the Press
on March 16, 2003, and said that the IAEA had been wrong before.
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These statements by Bush administration officials are a small chunk of a vast edifice of deceptions and misrepresentations. The Center for Public
Integrity, a nonprofit journalism organization, meticulously documented 935 false statements in the two years following 9/11 about the supposed security threat presented by Iraq in “Iraq: The War Card.”
56

On March 18, 2003, President Bush certified in a letter to Congress that a war in Iraq was a “necessary” action against those who “planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001.”
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This document was required by Congress before war could start. The day after he sent the letter, the president sent military planes and tanks roaring into Iraq.

Those who have sifted through the evidence and made findings about what was known during the time period that these statements were being made by the president, vice president, and others have found a multitude of deceptions. “It is now beyond dispute that Iraq did not possess any weapons of mass destruction or have meaningful ties to Al Qaeda,” wrote investigative reporters at the Center for Public Integrity. “The Bush administration led the nation to war on the basis of erroneous information that it methodically propagated and that culminated in military action against Iraq,” they said.
58

“In making the case for war, the Administration repeatedly presented intelligence as fact when in reality it was unsubstantiated, contradicted, or even non-existent,” said Senator Jay Rockefeller, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, on June 5, 2008, after completing a report on prewar intelligence and information. “As a result, the American people were led to believe that the threat from Iraq was much greater than actually existed. . . . Top Administration officials made repeated statements that falsely linked Iraq and al Qaeda as a single threat and insinuated that Iraq played a role in 9/11. Sadly, the Bush Administration led the nation into war under false pretenses.”
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In retrospect, another thing is clear. A pattern emerges in this intensive campaign to launch the war. The president and his team made the hyped-up statements on television, on radio, in speeches, in public forums—places where criminal claims of deceiving Congress would not apply. If a member of Congress read the newspaper or watched a Sunday-morning talk show, or listened to a speech at the United Nations, so much the better for the Bush team. The communications were meant to deceive but, as public commentary, would not fall within the definition of Section 1001 on false statements to Congress or Section 371 of the federal code on defrauding
Congress. For the majority of these communications, carefully manicured and crafted messaging was used to avoid areas in which the White House could be caught lying to Congress.

But on at least two occasions, the president directly addressed Congress, potentially running smack into the United States Criminal Code.

The president's 2003 State of the Union address and his March 18, 2003, letter of determination to use military force in Iraq were direct communications to Congress made personally by the president. If they were deliberately deceptive, violations of federal law appear to be possible. Despite the deceptions the White House may have blunted prosecution under Section 1001; still, the same deceptions may add up to a case for conspiracy to defraud Congress under Section 371, and there, the White House may have been knocked off course a bit.

President Bush's 2003 State of the Union message, a mere fifty-one days before the attack on Iraq, enters the realm of possible criminal law violation because it contained a series of untrue statements that, available evidence indicates, the president knew to be false or deceptive. President Bush raised the specter that Iraq was arming with nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons and conspiring with Osama bin Laden, as he had in public speeches for the prior four and a half months. While the assertions in this speech were familiar, the venue was not. This was a speech that the president made directly to both houses of Congress, and the law against making false statements to Congress may be relevant.

The president's speech was intended to convey that the United States faced severe threats from Iraq and dire consequences would follow unless the country attacked Iraq first. He called Iraq “evil,” just as he had called al Qaeda “evil.” The president of the United States said:

This frightening scenario was based on a catalog of untruths. The president already knew from his briefings that there was no connection between Iraq and al Qaeda, and he knew that there was no evidence that Iraq had any weapons of mass destruction.

The president said:

But on January 27, 2003, the day before the president's speech, the IAEA reported to the UN Security Council that the aluminum tubes—a necessary component of nuclear weapons technology—were for other, non-nuclear uses.
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Anticipating the UN report, the
Washington Post
, in an article titled “U.S. Claim on Iraqi Nuclear Program Is Called Into Question,” on January 24, 2003, stated: “After weeks of investigation, U.N. weapons inspectors in Iraq are increasingly confident that the aluminum tubes were never meant for enriching uranium.” The article noted that the British government had dismissed the claim in a white paper five months earlier, saying that there was “no definitive intelligence” that the tubes were destined for a nuclear program.
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Two key U.S. intelligence agencies with expertise on nuclear weapons—the State Department and the Department of Energy (DOE), which houses the government's main experts on the subject—had also informed the president in October 2002 that the aluminum tubes in question were not suited for nuclear weapons, according to partially declassified information released in July 2003. The president gave no sign that his statement was seriously questioned by the “intelligence sources” that knew the most. The Department of Energy specialists are described as saying, “DOE . . . assesses that the tubes probably are not part of the [nuclear weapons] program.” The State Department experts concluded: “The tubes
are not intended for use in Iraq's nuclear weapons program.” While the assessment by the CIA—by no means expert on the complexities of nuclear technology—differed, the nuclear scientists who had actually measured the tubes had concluded that they were not designed for nuclear purposes, but for standard rockets.
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Tubes intercepted en route to Iraq were too heavy and too thick for nuclear uses, the former top State Department intelligence analyst Greg Thielmann told
60 Minutes
in February 2004. “Key evidence cited by the administration was misrepresented to the public,” said Thielmann.
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According to investigative reporter Murray Waas, a one-page classified “President's Summary,” written expressly for the president in October 2002, three months before his speech, gave direct warning that the accuracy of the tubes claim was in serious doubt. “Bush had been specifically advised that claims he later made in his 2003 State of the Union address—that Iraq was procuring high-strength aluminum tubes to build a nuclear weapon—might not be true,” Waas wrote in the
National Journal
on March 20, 2006.
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The president failed to give Congress a truthful assessment of the aluminum tubes.